Philip R. Bingham

The teaching of VHDL in computer architecture

There are problems in incorporating VHDL into the undergraduate curriculums beginning computer architecture courses. The problems relate mainly to cost arising from two factors: VHDL tool availability and proper lecture material to coincide with the course objective(s). At the Georgia Institute of Technology, pilot VHDL lecture materials have been developed to address these two issues.

Teaching pipelining and concurrency using hardware description languages

Relating to a previous simplified VHDL processor model, a more advanced synthesized VHDL pipeline microprocessor model was developed and has been used in the second term computer architecture course offered in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. This paper first describes the pipeline processor model and its VHDL implementation. It then presents various implementation extensions that have been assigned and completed within a satisfactory period by participating students.